27 March
2008

Sky Scout star finder

A while back I got a Celestron SkyScout start finder, courtesy of my wife. This is a portable gadget that uses a combination of GPS, magnetometer, and inclinometer, all solid robotic sensing technologies, to identify a star. You look through a hole to target a star, but the star identification process has nothing optical about it, which is a very neat trick. I describe it in the enclosed video (which is my first little experiment in video blogging -- next time, I'll try not to do it right after a bad night's sleep).

Oh, if you want to find it on Amazon.com, then click here. They call it
the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium. They also have a version
combined with a green laser pointer.

Shortcomings of the Celestron SkyScout: takes a few minutes to acquire a GPS lock, LCD display is not great in very cold weather. Neither of these is serious.

Shortcomings of the video: too low a speaking volume, cluttered background, I look really tired.

Posted by dudek at 17:08 March 27, 2008 | Leave a comment | permalink link to this entry |

<< St George's robot pictures | Main | apache2 SSL configuration, error -12227 and self-signed certificates >>

Comments

There are no comments.

Trackbacks

Please send trackback to:/blog/107/tbping

There are no trackbacks.

Post your own response

Name or nickname:
(Some kind of name is required, will be visible)

Required, whatever you enter will be visible to other users.

Email Address:
(Optional, used for "mailto" link)

Your email address is not required, but if you insert it it will be displayed so people can contact you.

URL:
(Optional, will appear as a link)

Leave an URL if you want to provide a relevant link that relates to your comment or identifies you.

Title:

The title for your comment.

Comments:

Your comment goes here. All relevant comments are welcome, except for those that simply promote an irrelevant product or else are used to fraudulently inflate the link count to an irrelevant web page. Don't forget to also fill in the captcha below or your text will be rejected!

Captcha: You must answer this question to prove you are human
what is 4 plus 3?

Answer this question correctly to demonstrate that you are not a dumb spambot.

Remember your info. on cookie?

Pop book: digital TV

Check out my new book dealing with digital television, broadcast video encoding and how to select, install, understand and manipulate satellite, cable and over-the-air broadcast television. Available at Amazon.com or via the publisher.
Digital Television at Home Book cover

Something more academic? Try Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics (2nd edition) the latest revision.